Maximus Darn blinked weakly inside the suffocating darkness, his limbs numb and unresponsive. The world had narrowed to the burning pain in his side and the scraping thud of his own body pulled across unforgiving cement. "So this is it. My grand exit, zipped up like yesterday’s laundry," he thought, bitterness and a flicker of humor mingling even as life ebbed from his wounds. Memories surged, sharp and vivid, as the warehouse’s chill pressed against his skin.

Long-buried pain churned in Maximus's chest. He remembered Kyle Darn, his brother, lifeless and pale; his father’s desperate race to the hospital that ended in screeching metal and shattered glass; his mother’s empty stare before she, too, was lost. The world had stripped him bare, leaving only a stubborn, desperate core. Yet in those ashes, he’d forged the White Tiger Gang, gathering the broken and the angry beneath his banner. "If the world keeps taking, you start taking back," he reminded himself—a mantra that had become his armor.

The voice from above was chilling, heavy with contempt. Masked Executioner seized a handful of Maximus's hair, wrenching his head up. "Still cracking jokes, even now? I can’t believe a punk like you led the White Tiger Gang," the figure sneered, the mask muffling their tone but not the venom. "Could’ve been Harry Potter for all I know," Maximus slurred, trying to squint through blood-blurred vision. The masked man laughed, cruel and dark, before revealing his face—though Maximus, blinded by his wounds, could see nothing. "You always said nobody could own you. But you were wrong. Gangs don’t rule this city. Money does."

Panic flared, then anger. His thoughts screamed: Who had betrayed him? Whose money had bought his death? Only someone close knew his defiant creed. His fury burned, desperate for answers, a final wish hurled into the void as the darkness closed in. Slowly, the pain dulled. Maximus’s world shrank to a pinpoint of cold, then nothing.

A searing pain split Maximus's head. He fought to move, to open his eyes, but his body seemed foreign, every nerve alight with agony. Voices swirled around him, urgent and unfamiliar. Hospital Director barked orders: "Do everything you can for Max Stern. Money is no object. The Stern family demands it. Fail, and you’re finished." Confusion crashed through Maximus. Max Stern? The Stern family—one of the nation’s richest dynasties?

Maximus struggled to piece together reality. He wasn’t dead—at least, not in the way he expected. His name, his body, his entire life had been rewritten. The trauma and fury of his old world clung to him, but now, wealth and power surrounded him like armor. "If money rules this city," he thought, staring at his unfamiliar reflection, "then maybe it's time I learned the rules—and made them my own."